Piracy and Agile
Do Agile IT projects have anything to learn from the organizational structures and laws used by pirates? Phil Factor is not convinced.
TSQL Challenge 64 - A Payroll calculation Challenge
This challenge invites you to solve a payroll challenge which requires special calculation of holidays and absences that are adjacent to holidays
Using a SQL Server Alias for SSIS Package Configuration Database Connection String
In this tip we will walk through setting up the SQL Server Alias and using it with SQL Server package configuration in an SSIS package.
The Growth of Data Types
This week Steve Jones asks you what you think will make up the majority of your future databases? Will it be numerical data or will some other type come to dominate?
Configure SQL Server Database Mirroring Using SSMS
This tip outlines a test environment and then walks through the process of setting up Database Mirroring. This includes the configurations, backups, restores and verification process.
Recovery Models
Learn the basics of recovery models in this short article from SQL Server guru and MVP, Gail Shaw.
Where Do You Park?
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. Most people work in an office and need to commute, which brings with it the inevitable fight for parking in many companies. How is it handled for you?
Preventing Problems in SQL Server
It is never a good idea to let your users be the ones to tell you of database server outages. It is far better to be able to spot potential problems by being alerted for the most relevant conditions on your servers at the best threshold. This will take time and patience, but the reward will be an alerting system which allows you to deal more effectively with issues before they involve system down-time.
The Special Cloud
Amazon has built a cloud just for the US government. Will we see more specialized clouds in the future that might let us move some of our data to the cloud?
Blogs
Automatic Index Compaction
By ReviewMyDB
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....
The Goldilocks problem – Materialized Views
I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but...
Monday Monitor Tips: Virtual Machine Usage and Cost
By Steve Jones
One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
How We Handled a Vendor Retry That Loaded Twice in Snowflake
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How We Handled a Vendor...
Cognitive Coverage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Cognitive Coverage
Question of the Day
Getting the Average
I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database.
salesperson commission Brian 12 Brian 16 Andy 7 Andy 14 Andy 21 Steve 20 Steve NULLAll the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson.
SELECT SalesPerson
, AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
FROM commission
GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve? See possible answers